James McGovern is an industry thought leader whose focus is on the human aspects of technology around open source, SOA, software security, enterprise architecture and agile software development.

The opinions expressed herein may or may not represent my own personal opinions and definitively do not represent my employer's view in any way...

Sunday, December 30, 2007

The 2008 Hartford BarCamp

Many folks know that I am organizing several OWASP meetings, but I decided that in 2008, the Northeast really needs a kick ass Barcamp...

If you aren't familar with a BarCamp, it is an unconference; it's open and free; it's organized bottoms-up instead of top-down; anybody can organize it and anybody can attend it. Folks on my side of town are so enterprisey where we to busy worrying about perception management that we don't actually talk to each other. I figured that it is long overdue for my industry peers to remove that stick shoved up their butt and learn what it feels like to have an honest conversation.

Unlike most unconferences though, we will not exclusively have newbie speakers and have lined up some pretty cool folks to speak on topics such as Smalltalk, Software Security, Web 2.0, Agile Software Development, SOA, and open source. You will recognize the names of many of the planned speakers. Of course, if you have a topic in which you would like to present, please don't hesitate to drop a suggestion.

Anyway, there are two things that still remain. I have many minor sponsors lined up and need one large software vendor to be the premier sponsor. I will also be pinging the folks at Rensselaer to see if they are willing to donate their facilities.

I am not sure if I am violating some unstated protocol, but I do plan on doing a mashup between the BarCamp, OWASP, COOUG, QAAC and whatever else happens to come to mind.

If you like this idea, please show your support by amplifying this blog entry. In the meantime, I need to get back to OWASP matters. Did I mention that the next OWASP meeting will have Gary McGraw of Cigital along with Chenxi Wang of Forrester? This event will be hot...